Improve links to your website with easy social media sharing options

Many small business websites miss out on an easy link building strategy that allows website visitors to quickly share website content. This strategy is called social media sharing or social bookmarking.

When I bring social media sharing up to my small business clients, they often tell me they don’t have time for social media. (Which often leads to a lengthy discussion outside the topic of this article…)

In response, I tell them that it doesn’t matter whether they use social media or not because their website visitors probably use social media. And we can make it easy for those visitors to share links to their website all over the place with share buttons.

Sharing Content with and without Social Media Buttons

First, I’m going to share some examples with you. You’ve probably even experienced these situations yourself many times.

In the examples below, I use Facebook, but in reality, the visitor can share content with any social media website such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, or StumbleUpon.

Which of the following do you think is easier?

SOCIAL MEDIA SHARING WORKS LIKE THIS:

A person visits your website and likes what you wrote on a web page or in an article.

They want to share your web page or article with their own friends on Facebook.

On your website, then click on the sharing button for Facebook.

The visitor’s Facebook feed is updated with a link to your web page or article.

IN COMPARISON, THIS IS WHAT THE VISITOR WOULD DO ON A WEBSITE WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA SHARING BUTTONS:

A person visits your website and likes what you wrote on a web page or in an article.

They want to share your web page or article with their own friends on Facebook.

They copy the URL of your web page or article from the browser.

They go to their Facebook profile.

They paste the URL as a link to your web page into their Facebook status.

They add an optional comment about the link and then Post it to their feed.

The Pros and Cons of Social Media Sharing

As with any approach to website design and SEO, there are tradeoffs of the best strategy to use. This often depends upon the content on your website and how your website is designed. Here are some things to consider before you dive in.

PROS

Use of social media sharing can add links to your website, increase website traffic, and enhance brand awareness

By reviewing the analytics from your social media sharing, you can determine the most shared pages and the most popular social media sites for your content. You can then use this information for developing future content and social media campaigns.

CONS

Because social media sharing uses code outside your website, it can slow down the loading of web pages

Showing counter buttons on seldom shared web pages can look like you don’t get many website visitors or that people don’t enjoy your content.

How to add Social Media Sharing to your website

Social Media Sharing buttons are generally provided through a service that you sign up for. Two popular services are AddThis and ShareThis. A service is used because the special code is needed on your website to provide the sharing function of the buttons. The services also keep track of some analytics for you so you can see what the most popular pages and social media networks are for your website.

After signing up for an account on a social media sharing service website, you can configure how you want the buttons to look and even what buttons to show on your website.

To add the social media sharing to your website, you need to get the appropriate code installed into your web pages. So, go to either AddThis or ShareThis and follow the instructions on their website. If you’re not a techie, have your website designer help you out here.

If you use a content management system like WordPress, you can simply install and configure a plugin. Here are links to some plugins for WordPress:

Of course, there are many options available for social media sharing. I mention a just few here.

The bottom line is that you need to decide if you want people to be able to quickly share links to your website and if so how do you want to accomplish that so that it fits with your website design and marketing goals.